Superintendent Ron Crates has a monumental challenge ahead as he
attempts to lead the Hollister School District through a transition
in which declining enrollment numbers have forced cuts and layoffs
in the short term, while there’s still an expectation and a vital
need to plan into the future for long-term expansion.
Plan could curb transfers by offering choices
Superintendent Ron Crates has a monumental challenge ahead as he attempts to lead the Hollister School District through a transition in which declining enrollment numbers have forced cuts and layoffs in the short term, while there’s still an expectation and a vital need to plan into the future for long-term expansion.
Though his “School of Choice” program doesn’t directly address the district’s continually dipping enrollment, it has potential – if Crates’ hope turns to fruition – to reduce the number of parents who are turned off by lacking choices and instead, as in prior years, have turned to interdistrict transfer opportunities and other options as alternatives to their neighborhood schools.
The plan is the latest attempt to sway an apparent resentment that has, for instance, led to 25 percent of the Spring Grove School student population in the nearby North County Union School District being made up of HSD transfers. Overall in the 2007-08 school year, 431 students were transferred out of the district by their parents.
Trend must be reversed
It’s an unacceptable trend that Crates wants to reverse. And the School of Choice program – intended to increase the number of options for parents by expanding Gavilan Hills School and Calaveras School to having kindergarten through eighth-grade offerings over the next several years – should help convince at least some parents to stay within the district boundaries.
It’s a start.
Even the short-term challenge – declining enrollment and coincidingly reduced state funding – is a matter of years from a potential reversal. So Crates is realistic and acknowledged to the Free Lance Editorial Board recently that more layoffs are likely ahead next year on top of 39 pink slips already issued this year.
Throw in the seemingly endless instability of the state budget, and the immensity of this multi-faceted challenge grows with every new student who leaves the district for other options.
It’s why, at least as a short-term means of plugging this perennially breached dam, it only makes sense to give parents another reason to trust that the Hollister district is as good or better than other available choices.
